Flight Deck

As I write this I am high above Canada, flying home from my last March Break.  I am secure in my seat, but the thought does creep into my head; is my pilot any good?  How do I know that the static filled voice that tells me the weather in Toronto, knows what he is doing?  Ultimately, I am relying on the other professional that sits to his or her right in that cockpit.  I am trusting that each is evaluating the performance of the other.  I trust that, while they are flying the aircraft, each has an eye on the other.

To compare flying a plane to piloting a classroom may on its surface, be perverse.  However, we lock children, vulnerable people, in classrooms with teachers for up to six hours a day for ten months at a time. And while a teacher rarely  makes a life or death decision in his or her daily business, a teacher can have a large impact on the well being of a student.  So it seems to me, that an evaluation and improvement of a teacher is as important, in the long run, as an evaluation and development of a pilot.

The most meaningful evaluation of my work has not come from the standard performance appraisal I have had once every two to three years as mandated by my contract.  Most of these were monotonous affairs, where an administrator, who may know little about my area of curriculum and in some cases had far less experience in a classroom than I, filled out a form created out of a union negotiation.  Ultimately, this produced a performance appraisal that was as helpful to me as the food service on this plane is to its navigation.

Evaluations of me by students haven't been any better.  Some blow smoke at me as they look for a higher mark while others carry out vendettas on-line.  Helpful insight has been rare among parents as well, who know as much about teaching as I do about flying this plane.  After all, I've been on a plane before, so how hard can it be to fly it?

Setting aside the stale jokes about airline food and lost bags, there is a lot to admire about the aviation industry.  There are regular checks on pilots and most importantly, each professional demands the best out of the person next to them.  This is what the evaluation and improvement of teachers needs to be like and I have been lucky enough to work in such an environment.

The best evaluation, the most important professional development, has come in a workroom not much bigger than the flight deck of this aircraft.  The nine teachers in that windowless room have managed to create a professional work environment that encourages constant improvement.  We read widely outside of school.  We develop and share resources.   We talk constantly about our courses, techniques that work and over our weekends and holidays use a "group chat" to augment our teaching practices.  Finally we are in and out of each other's classrooms and  like the pilots here, we help each other make subtle course corrections as we go about our daily work.  We share all of these things and in so doing, we demand a better performance from each other.  This may not be the case in all schools but my hunch is that it is as common in education as it is for a plane to land successfully.

I have to return my tray to its upright position now and fasten my seat belt.  The lights of Toronto are below and with the care and attention of a  team of professionals, I will be on the ground shortly, heading into the last leg of my career.  I'm looking forward to seeing those teachers in that windowless room.

On Coaching

I really like the picture that accompanies this week’s blog.  It is a picture of two of my former players, one a coach at Humber College and the other an outstanding shooting guard on a very good high school team I coached a few years ago. They are celebrating a college national championship.

Coaching was a major part of my teaching life.  I figure I coached somewhere around 50 teams, over 1000 games and around 4000 practices.  I think I coached nearly 500 players.  I started coaching basketball because I loved the complexity of the game, as many of my former players know, I often called it "high speed, moving chess."  I enjoyed the intricacy of it and I enjoyed breaking it down and having each player master skills that made them part of a successful whole.  I felt like it was a moment in my work where I could see if my skills were as good as I thought they might be.

There's a fair bit of ego in that last statement.  When I first started, I saw it about me, my ability, my teaching, my coaching.  When I finished, I was a little better at letting the performance of the athlete be theirs and theirs alone.  While winning remained an important part of my coaching, at the end of my career, it became more than that.

 At the end now, I wonder about the sacrifices.  The countless hours in gyms and weight rooms, on road trips, driving vans full of tired or cranky or hungry  kids, was  it worth it?  This is an easy question to answer when my own children were on the teams.  I wouldn't change a thing of that but the other years? What about the countless seasons where I coached other people's children and was away from my own?  What about the sacrifice my wife made? She saw little of the reward and a lot of the pain.

Dutch thinker and historian, Rutger Bergman argues that in our modern economy many of the jobs we have are what he calls "bull shit jobs."  He goes on to define a "bullshit job" as one where even the person employed in such a manner sees it as "superfluous".  He lists PR advisers, Human Resource managers, telemarketers and most administrative jobs in both the private and public sectors.  I've been lucky, there's been very little bull shit in my job.  Some, but probably not enough to completely cover the bottom of your shoe.  My work has been meaningful in many ways that I hadn't predicted.

In a melding of the two sides of my work life, I now, more than ever, see basketball as a metaphor.  Faulkner in his essay "On Receiving the Nobel Prize" writes about writing as the only thing "worth the sweat and the agony."  He also worries that modern writers will write only of "victories without hope and worst of all without pity and compassion." He also is afraid of  "defeats in which no one loses anything of value."

High school basketball  gave me these things.  It gave me the chance at victories where I could teach compassion and the value of the agony and the sweat.  The insulting balm that non-participants use to sooth players and coaches after a loss is "it's just a game."  No it is not just a game.  It is a metaphor for our dedication to each other.  A symbol of what we are willing to sacrifice for each other.  It is covenant between a teacher and a player, each committing completely to the other and when we failed, we knew we had lost something of value.

Look at that picture again.  Coaching has given me this.

Reflections in a Window

I wonder if you've ever considered just how much music a high school coach has to listen to as he or she drives teams to and from games and tournaments.  If you ever did consider this, you would be far kinder to your teachers.  Over thirty years of teaching and coaching, believe me it adds up to a lot of music.

It hasn't always been pretty.  There's been some dry years.  There was Milli Vanilli on the way up to Algonquin Park for a camping trip. Three hours of  "Blame it on the Rain" does something to you.  Not quite sure what it does but it does something to you.  They don't even do that to detainees in Guantanamo.

The millennium wasn't much better.  Katy Perry's  Hot 'n Cold coming back from a tournament in Kingston was a difficult time.   "You're in and you're out, you're up and you're down".  You don't just shrug off insight like that.

Then there was Blind River (Old Neil sings about her ya know), who could forget Blind River.

I'm driving a van full of boys to Blind River. I don't know why it's Blind River...just accept that as our destination.  It's the early '90's and we leave the school at 6 am.  This basketball trip, like all basketball trips, past, present and future begins with the fight over who rides shotgun and by default, who controls the music. The '90's  is the decade of the mix tape and each player wants to take his turn playing his favourite music. This will be a trip dominated by The Tragically Hip.  We will listen to it in one form or another in one mix tape or another, on both legs of the journey.

When I check into the Mom and Pop motel after a long, long drive, the owner keeps looking over my shoulder and asking "Are they are good boys?".  I reassure him but he seems nervous.  And then I see what he sees; the van is rocking side to side, two wheels off the ground in beat, as the boys jam to Little Bones. The windows are fogged and they are singing at the top of their lungs.

It could be quite a weekend.

There's the games themselves, which are endless and relentless.  There's the host school, W.C. Eaket,  inviting all the teams to a dance on the Friday night.  There's me, in my pajamas, clearing every teenage girl in Blind River out of the motel parking lot after the dance.  There's my point guard developing a throat abscess, collapsing after the semi-final game.  There's his trip to a Sault Ste. Marie Hospital, in an ambulance, and my co-coach having to borrow a car and stay for two nights on a friend's couch in the Soo until the parents arrive.  To this day I have no idea how the coach got home.

There's the Innkeeper on Sunday morning asking "if I'd like to take the empties back to the beer store?"  It's one of the few times there is absolute silence in the van.

Then there's the knifing snowstorm home; a white knuckle drive along old highway 69.  We are asked to leave a Pizza Hut in Parry Sound because the boys have devoured the entire Hut. Serves them right to advertise "all you can eat for $5.99."  The van at this point is a rolling compost pile encrusted in road salt; food wrappers, empty cups and of course the unmistakable smell of adolescence having played four games and not having showered.  Did you know sometimes players think that not changing your socks brings you luck? True fact.

It is very late now.  The van is quiet.  Most of the players are asleep except for Matt in the shotgun seat.  He begins to talk.  They always begin to talk at this moment.  It's Matt this time but it could be Daniel or Katie or Pat or Kelly or Phil.  Each will stare out the window, while the music is low and will ask me questions or will tell me about his or her family or his or her dreams.  I won't say much, nod a bit, shift in my seat. They'll talk and talk, coming to conclusions about themselves that they will only find in the reflection of a window at night.

I drop the last player off.  It has been a twelve hour drive.   He turns to me,"Sir, you are so lucky."
"Why's that?"
"You get to do this every year."

Yes, yes I do.

A Student Leads the Way

I have been thinking of two men.  The first is a former student who gave a presentation to our school this past week as a member of the Get Real organization that encourages tolerance, understanding and fairness to all.

I was moved by the presentation of our former student.   He spoke of how a Catholic teacher really saved his life by making a stand against homophobia and gay slurs in his classroom.  The young man was in grade 11 at the time and he told us, "I really didn't hear what the teacher said for the rest of the class.  I only heard that he said it was Ok to be gay and that I deserved to be respected."  This is the power and responsibility that teachers have. With a few words we can damage a life or we can save it.  We can rectify an injustice. We can make things better.

But when the former student spoke to the staff at our monthly meeting, later in the day, I began to think of another man, a former colleague.  He and I worked together for over twenty years. He met his partner around the same time I met Christine.  They have been together as long as we have and it wasn't until his retirement party that he felt comfortable enough to include his partner in the social life of our school.  His partner never attended a staff function; he never came to a graduation, a theater production, a game. His partner never felt included enough to chaperone a dance, to come to a staff sponsored Jays game or to attend the Christmas party.  He never spoke of his partner, about their weekends or their vacations.  He lived far away from the school and our small town so that his secret and our shame, would never be addressed.

When I heard the student's story, I was moved but I was angered as well. The very teachers who are asked to work to create inclusive environments, classrooms free of bullying and prejudice are themselves victims of both.  I have worked with many gay teachers over my career and all of them have been forced to live double lives.

We live in strange times. So many barriers have come down yet we live in a time when a Catholic teacher can still be fired for loving someone.  It is bizarre that Kathleen Wynne, the Premier of our province and a former Minister of Education, could, if she could get past the prejudice hiring practices of Catholic boards, be fired for her marriage.

This is an injustice and the only way it can be resolved is if Catholic teachers demand justice.

Defending Civility

I am coaching my son's basketball team at a tournament in Toronto.  My wife is going to come to the second game and bring our daughter, to watch our suburban team take on one of the best teams in Ontario. She calls me, asking for directions to the school and I go out into the parking lot of the school to get better reception and give her better directions.

I'm distracted by the phone, the upcoming game and as I look around the parking lot, it seems I have stumbled into a fight.

Now, I'm from Oshawa.  Fights in Oshawa were fights, you know.  There was no rolling around on top of each other with somebody's friends piling on and out manning some poor kid. The fights in the suburban school I teach in had always been little more than slap-fests with someone vowing to get their Mom to call the school.  Fights in Oshawa were generally, one on one and usually ended with someone either capitulating or being knocked unconscious.  The fight I stumbled into was an Oshawa style fight. Except for the bystanders.  Many of them weren't kids, many of them were adults, maybe even parents of the two kids fighting.

Well, I'm in it now aren't I.  I close my flip phone, use my teacher voice to tell the kids to stop fighting.  No effect.  When I say they were kids, I mean they were teenagers but each was well over 6' tall.  I yell again. No response.  Finally, I wade into the fight, grab one fellow by the ear (I don't know where that came from) and the other fellow by the scruff of the neck. Now, as many of you know, I am a powerful 5'7" but even at that great stature, I had both my arms well above my head and the two combatants were now hunched over like church ushers.

I am yelling "stop, you stop" and then I look at the crowd that has now assembled in the parking lot and I start yelling at them; "you should be ashamed of yourselves, you're an embarrassment."  I take the two kids into the school, noticing that they both have the same basketball jackets on and deliver them to their coach.

Months later I am telling this story to a group and after I tell it, one person comes up to me and tells me she's a cop in that area and that what I did was foolish.  I could have been killed she tells me.  She tells me, in that area of Toronto, they don't get out of the cruiser unless there are at least two other cruisers there.

It is a story I tell with some hesitation because of the ability of stories to build myth.  I am asked to tell it a few times a year and I always do so with some trepidation as to not sound boastful or heroic in any way. I tell it to you now because we live in dangerous times .

Maybe I was foolish.  Maybe I was lucky and I certainly wouldn't recommend others take a similar risk but the world has changed.  Maybe the civility we inherited and have been expected to maintain, has taken a hit or two.  Whether it is in a parking lot, or in a plane, at a dinner table or on social media we have to confront boorishness and in order to protect civility, the "snowflakes" as we are sometimes called, might have to bend an ear or two.

Lighting our way Home

There is something about an old school at night.   There's one around the corner from my house.  It has been abandoned for years, recently sold to a developer and is soon to find a new life as the center of a condo project.  Its skin thin windows, are always dark. The cement and stone steps, where generations of children and their teachers marched, jumped, skipped, ran and trudged up, are now cracked and full of weeds in the summer, covered in snow this cold night.

I pull up to the stop sign near the school.  It is that time of winter when the days are getting longer and as I pull over to look, everything, cars, road, snow and school is coloured by a pink hue of a setting sun.  It is a scene out of a Frost poem.

There it is,  a light in the second floor window, in the corner classroom and just for a moment, I am happier than I have been all day.

Just for a moment, I think the school is alive again.  There is a teacher in that room.  She is grading some papers or she is preparing tomorrow's lessons.  I think she should get home, it is too late and her family needs her.  Or maybe there are students there.  They are staying late, practicing for an upcoming concert or play.  Maybe they are working on a class project and the teacher is helping them.  Maybe it's the custodian, pushing the chairs in, getting ready to wash the floors, picking up a sweater  that has dropped from a desk. Or maybe it is the principal, sitting with some parents, discussing their child's progress, each trying to find difficult answers. Or maybe it is the parent's council, trying to figure out how to raise some funds for a school trip.  In my mind, they are all there tonight and it makes me smile to myself as I put the car in gear.

A light in a window of an abandoned school has somehow made me warm on a cold winter's night.  I turn the corner and head home but my eyes keep glancing to my rear view mirror, hoping to see a silhouette of a person in the school; hoping to see all of those people who make a school.

But it's not just the desire to see the building alive again that has warmed me.  It is the importance of these places. We have built these places and while some need to be torn down or re-purposed, they remind me of the great commitment that we have made to one another and of our dedication to each others' children.

This is the light that guides me home.

The Rolling of the Lemons

Ontario's public education system is, by any measure, one of the best in the world but there are two festering sores that, if not treated, will cause this system to suffer irreparable damage.  The first, the hiring of new teachers, I dealt with here.

The second is the dismissal of incompetent teachers.

Let's begin with the case of a teacher who, according to an investigation by the Ontario College of Teachers, was found to have:

• Failed to maintain a the standards of the profession
• Failed to keep records according to the standards of the profession
• Failed to adequately supervise people under his or her care
• Failed to comply with the Education Act

Evidence was presented at the teacher's hearing that he or she was:

• unprepared for class
• did not provide students with feedback
• did not monitor students properly
• did not know how to manage a classroom
• did not know the curriculum

The teacher was reprimanded and publicly admonished in the College of Teacher's magazine Professionally Speaking.  Remember, this represents a case where the Principal, the Board, the Union, the teacher's colleagues, the parents and students all did what they were supposed to do; they reported, they documented, they gave adequate defense, they counselled.  

This teacher is still in our classrooms.

This is the shame of my profession and there's plenty of blame to go around.  

First we have boards and the government of Ontario.  The boards poorly screen new hires in their first years, failing to weed out obviously flawed candidates. Connected to this is the Ontario government and its regulation 274 that hires teachers on seniority rather than merit.  You could not design a better system to encourage mediocrity. 

Once an incompetent teacher is hired, boards move them, rolling these lemons on a regular basis and remaining unmoved by the pleas of parents, teachers, administrators and students.  Boards of education remain terrified of law suits and as a result grow more and more comfortable with the incompetency that they have permitted to grow. 

Why did the board of education, who employs the teacher in the case above, continue to employ the teacher?  

Next, teachers and their unions are to blame.  Many times teachers, for fear of reprisal, fail to report gross incompetency.  They turn a blind eye to the incompetent across the hall, willing to throw other people's children in front of these disasters.  The teachers' unions, trying to defend "the process" defend gross incompetency, with little regard for the harm it does to students and the reputation of their membership and their own credibility in the educational conversation.  Some of these incompetents are defended by the union their entire careers, wasting the time and energy  and resources of the union that should be used to protect and promote the good work most teachers do.

Finally, the public and the College of Teachers must shoulder some of the blame.  The parents, for quietly trying "to get through the year" and not willing to report gross examples of incompetence and the College of Teachers for only tackling the most egregious of behaviors and maintaining such a low bar of professional conduct that even teachers who have been drunk in classrooms can step over it. A reprimand in these types of cases is not enough.  The College should strip the licenses of these incompetents on a far more regular basis.  This would at least justify the expense and opulence of the College.

There are over a 110,000 teachers in Ontario and we can all agree the vast, vast majority of them are competent, hard working, conscientious professionals.  However, listen to any discussion of public education and you will hear that everyone has had an experience with an incompetent teacher at some point in their time in the education system.  This is unacceptable.

It is unacceptable that we take our most vulnerable people, our children, and place them in front of an incompetent for up to six hours a day for an entire school year and we do nothing about it.   

I know that the best in our system, our teachers, are sick of our worst.  Let's get rid of them.